Me and James Jaeger (director of Fiat Empire - The Federal Reserve Is Unconstitutional and other documentary films, which you can watch on Youtube) are talking about forming a business together to create "IP Walkie Talkies", a wireless mesh network of cell-phone like devices that form a free peer to peer Internet thats off the grid, no monthly fees, no central control, freedom of speech, and it may have some similarities to MerkleWeb. We're still talking about how to build it. Soon we may be looking for employees and business partners. Anyone interested? Join the talk here:
We have the right to freedom of speech therefore also have the right to create and use communication systems which are free of anyone controlling that communication.
We could put every Internet Service Provider and Cell Phone business, out of business, since we would undercut their prices at ZERO per month and no censoring or central control. Don't worry about us becoming a monopoly, since my condition of helping with the project is it is toward an open source hardware and software, but not necessarily starting that way. Also it will prove to everyone that peer to peer Internet can work on a large scale, so others will start work on other forms of peer to peer large scale communication even if something goes wrong with that plan.
Its not hard to obsolete an infrastructure that's designed to crawl slowly as it waits for permission from a hierarchy organization. Peer to peer is naturally faster. For example, Apache Cassandra has a mostly peer to peer core and is used by Netflix to stream their videos, but peer to peer is only possible in server connections, while most Internet connections are client and can't connect directly to eachother (a form of censoring). Peer to peer is the future. Want to free the Internet and get rich at the same time?
The technical parts can be done, period. Here's why:
The following is true of IP Walkie Talkies and the existing Internet. Its a property of communication through space, not any specific communication system unless it can communicate faster than light. The existing Internet can be modeled using similar equations by counting the Internet Backbone as a large number of connected devices. These calculations are an estimate of what we need, to be calculated more exactly later. Not all of the variables below are used. Some of them are there for us to talk about later in this thread, to have standard words for these things.
networkArea = flat area the devices cover.
widthOfNetwork = squareRoot(networkArea). We're not going to consider the corners yet. Its approximate.
deviceQuantity = how many devices spread evenly in networkArea.
deviceWidthOfNetwork = squareRoot(deviceQuantity)
distanceBetweenDevices = widthOfNetwork / deviceWidthOfNetwork
radioDistance = how far the devices can reliably transmit a signal to other devices.
radioHopsWidthOfNetwork = widthOfNetwork / radioDistance
inefficiencyMultiplier = how many times more bandwidth than the perfect straight line path is actually used.
connectionsPerDevice = how many near devices each device communicates with.
bandwidthMultiplierForLongestPath = radioHopsWidthOfNetwork*inefficiencyMultiplier. This means how many times more bandwidth is used to send some bytes from one side of the network to the other, relative to how much bandwidth each device uses to do that together.
averagePathLength = average distance between endpoints where 2 devices communicate to eachother, as people command the devices to do.
bandwidthMultiplierForAveragePath = bandwidthMultiplierForLongestPath * averagePathLength / widthOfNetwork
maxBitsPerSecondPerDevice = bandwidth of each device. This is not about how much bandwidth it can actually use in the network.
fractionOfTimePeopleActivelyUseIt = People don't use their Internet connections or phones all the time. Even when reading a webpage, the computer is mostly idle. It uses the connection when you click or stream. This is about the times people normally use it, not in the middle of the night or early morning. Sitting at the computer isn't using it. Actively downloading or talking is using it. People will be motivated not to download constantly because the algorithms will give you only as much bandwidth as your hardware puts in.
averageInternetSpeedBitsPerSecondPerDevice = maxBitsPerSecondPerDevice / bandwidthMultiplierForAveragePath
activeInternetSpeedBitsPerSecondPerDevice = averageInternetSpeedBitsPerSecondPerDevice / fractionOfTimePeopleActivelyUseIt. This is how much speed people will actually see in the IP Walkie Talkie Internet and voice communication system, where voice is transmitted digitally as bits so its simply a realtime Internet at the core.
bitsPerSecondForAudio = how many bits per second used for people talking to eachother through the IP Walkie Talkies.
Example:
networkArea = USA is 9,826,675 square kilometers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAwidthOfNetwork = 3135 kilometers. Remember these calculations are approximate.
radioDistance = 5 kilometers.
radioHopsWidthOfNetwork = 627 hops.
inefficiencyMultiplier = 4, since its not going to find the exact shortest path, and we need some redundancy so theres no single point of failure. A single point of failure is often ok in a hierarchy based Internet since theres much fewer and each longer hops, like 20 hops, but not in a peer to peer system which must have many more and shorter faster hops.
bandwidthMultiplierForLongestPath = 2508
averagePathLength = 1000 kilometers.
bandwidthMultiplierForAveragePath = 800.
maxBitsPerSecondPerDevice = 8,000,000. This is 1 megabyte per second. Most network cards advertise at least 100 megabits (12.5 megabytes) per second. We're estimating lower because we have to do it on rechargable batteries and longer distance to the next device.
averageInternetSpeedBitsPerSecondPerDevice = 10,000
fractionOfTimePeopleActivelyUseIt = 1/20. Remember this is only when you click or stream, not when you're just reading a webpage.
activeInternetSpeedBitsPerSecondPerDevice = 200,000 bits per second.
That is 25 kilobytes per second. CD quality audio is 88 kilobytes/second. 25 is more than enough for phone audio (very long range Walkie Talkies, not necessarily connecting into the phone network, and not providing 911 service) and is also enough for very low quality streaming video and to load most webpages in a few seconds. Don't forget there is no monthly fee. Just buy the IP Walkie Talkie and plug its USB wire into your computer for free Internet service for life, and talk to people across the country with no monthly fee. The 25 kilobytes per second (if the research finds the radioDistance and other numbers match this example) is paid for by your device contributing to the wireless network while you're not using it. Its slower than "high speed Internet" but as technology advances this freedom Internet and voice communication will be faster.
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Constant data, like Bittorrent files or data on the Bitcoin network, could be done a different and much more efficient way, especially if we included hardware to quickly calculate a few common secure-hash algorithms, but those improvements for specific types of content can be done later.
